“I tell her we’re out for big business to-night, Joe.”

“Sky’s the limit.  Picked up a pin pointin’ toward me and sat with my back to a red-headed woman.  Can’t lose.”

“Well, good-night, Babe.  Take care o’ yourself.”

“Good night, Blutch.  You’ll play ’em close, honey?”

“You just know I will, Babe.”

An hour she sat there, alone on the chaise-longue, staring into space and smiling at what she saw there.  Finally she dropped back into the lacy mound of pillows, almost instantly asleep, but still smiling.

* * * * *

At four o’clock, that hour before dawn cracks, even the West Forties, where night is too often cacophonous with the sound of revelry, drop into long narrow aisles of gloom.  Thin, high-stooped houses with drawn shades recede into the mouse-colored mist of morning, and, as through quagmire, this mist hovering close to ground, figures skulk—­that nameless, shapeless race of many bloods and one complexion, the underground complexion of paste long sour from standing.

At somewhat after that hour Mr. Blutch Connors made exit from one of these houses, noiseless, with scarcely a click after him, and then, without pause, passed down the brownstone steps and eastward.  A taxicab slid by, its honk as sorrowful as the cry of a plover in a bog.  Another—­this one drawing up alongside, in quest of fare.  He moved on, his breath clouding the early air, and his hands plunged deep in his pockets as if to plumb their depth.  There was a great sag to the silhouette of him moving thus through the gloom, the chest in and the shoulders rounding and lessening their front span.  Once he paused to remove the brown derby and wipe at his brow.  A policeman struck his stick.  He moved on.

An all-night drug-store, the modern sort of emporium where the capsule and the herb have become side line to the ivoritus toilet-set and the pocket-dictionary, threw a white veil of light across the sidewalk.  Well past that window, but as if its image had only just caught up with him, Mr. Connors turned back, retracing ten steps.  A display-window, denuded of frippery but strewn with straw and crisscrossed with two large strips of poster, proclaimed Chicklet Face Powder to the cosmetically concerned.  With an eye to fidelity, a small brood of small chickens, half dead with bad air and not larger than fists, huddled rearward and out of the grilling light—­puny victims to an indorsed method of correspondence-school advertising.

Mr. Connors entered, scouting out a dozy clerk.

“Say, bo, what’s one of them chicks worth?”

“Ain’t fer sale.”

Mr. Connors lowered his voice, nudging.

“I gotta sick wife, bo.  Couldn’t you slip me one in a ’mergency?”

“What’s the idea—­chicken broth?  You better go in the park and catch her a chippie.”

“On the level, friend, one of them little yellow things would cheer her up.  She’s great one for pets.”